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mr_storysmith and strong_light have been wed. I wish the happy couple much love in their lives. I have some meandering and orthogonal thoughts to share, this will be a long post. (No photo right now, I didn't remember to take all my camera! )
Gearboxes
mr_storysmith and strong_light have a relationship that reminds me of a trick used by gearboxes in manual cars. When you change gear you do this:
- press in the clutch
- move the gear lever out of gear into neutral
- move the gear lever into gear
There is a trick here that my father explained to me as I endlessly questioned him about engineering when I was growing up. I was asking him if people had used principles of magnetism to create clutches instead of using clutch plates and he told me about 'synchros', synchronisation and the problem of getting two gears to mesh.*
You can think of a gearbox as having two halves, one half connected to the engine via the clutch, and another half connected to the wheels via a drive shaft. The gear box sits in the middle and changes the gearing between the engine and the wheels.
This looks like a nice simple arrangement but it isn't; there is a fundamental problem hidden in this description and it is a fundamental problem that exists all over the place, especially in relationships between people, in my experience. It reminds me the story of Morgue and Cal a lot.
The hidden bit is that when you change from neutral into a gear the gearbox has to do a bit of magical, invisible, but absolutely critical, catching up.
If you get two gears turning at different speeds and you try and mesh them together they will fight each other. Depending on how 'soft' the shape of the gear teeth are, the gears might just stubbornly refuse to mesh with a low wine. That is an awesome outcome as gearboxes go.
If the shape of the gear teeth is a bit harder, the gears will destroy each other, ripping each others teeth out, throwing them around with great force and in the process destroy all the other gears in the gear box. This process is noisy, dangerous and unrepairable.
I'm sure you have all changed gears in a manual car all the time without trouble, the piece of magic that does this is a 'synchro', a very soft gear that quietly changes the speed of the front half of the gearbox so that it matches the back half of a gearbox when you are in neutral with the clutch pressed down.
Before 'synchros' there was a specific technique for changing gears that applies very well to human relationships.
The process for changing gears in the 1920s looks like this:
- press in the clutch
- move the gear level out of gear into neutral
- guess what the ratio of engine speed you will need in the gear you are about to change to
- use the accelerator to alter the speed of the engine to your best guess
- attempt to change gear gently, if you have guessed correctly and altered the revs correctly you will change gear
- otherwise you will hear horrible grinding noises and remain in neutral.
This process applies for old cars, very old cars, cars from the 1920s.
In relationships often we strive to change gear like a modern car. We strive to go effortlessly and pleasantly from the friends-gear to the girlfriend-gear, from the girlfriend-gear to the serious-girlfriend-gear.
Sometimes changing relationship status works effortlessly like changing gears in a modern car, but much of the time making these transitions is like driving a car from the 1920s; unseen, guessed at momentum and forces hinder things.
And just like a 1920s car we often get stuck between gears as we attempt to change them, we try to go from friend to girlfriend, get it wrong somehow, make a lot of grinding noises and remain in neutral, not in girlfriend gear as desired but also not in the friend gear either!
Changing Gears
This is the part were I digress from talking up the new couple in rosy tones and instead address the difficult road that Morgue and Cal took to get were they are now, to talk about what I think was going on then, what is going on now and how that applies later.
From what I recollect, Morgue and Cal changed gears easily and pleasantly, from flatmate-gear to girlfriend-gear to serious-girlfriend-gear.
From my observations this seem to happen easy as if they had said to each other 'lets change to seriously girlfriend gear now' and then attempt the change, were successful and life was good. Like changing gears in modern cars, or in romance movies.
A some point, well, starting this sentence with a singular cardinality is misleading, let me try again.
At several points, so many points that I cannot recount them all, the Morgue and Cal gearbox tried to change from serious-girlfriend-gear into partner-gear.
I recall from my conversations with Morgue that this was the gear that the Morgue and Cal gearbox had decided that it wanted to be in. What happened when they tried to change were a lot of loud noises, grinding and complaining of metal that was not in fact quite in synch.
After each attempt they were left in neutral and had to start whole sequence of gears from the beginning again.
Morgue, and I presume Cal, found this process hurtful, frustrating and each attempt made them wonder if such a transition was possible, if the current attempted transition had just destroyed the Morgue and Cal gearbox or that the next attempted transition might.
The Morgue and Cal gearbox could run in friends-gear, girlfriend-gear, serious-girlfriend gear but could not on pain of damage get into partner-gear.
This process was long, bits of Morgue and Cal, teeth from their respecitve gearbox cogs would fly around. This gear change was attempted many times, from my recollection, over a period of years, perhaps 3 years, some of it in NZ, some of it overseas.
I honestly lost track of the number of times they tried to change gear. It occurred to me that possibly there were not compatible and that they might damage themselves quite a bit before they found this out.
A little while after both their returns to NZ however, they tried again and made the monumental leap from serious-girlfriend-gear to partner-gear.
For these two stubborn, smart and passionate people to finally get in synch enough to get into parnter-gear is a big deal.
I don't know what their magic 'synchro' was. Perhaps it was time, perhaps one of them had sped up or slowed down enough to match the other? Perhaps it was empathy, that they final understood each other enough to figure out how to engage each other at such a level?
On Saturday we witnessed another gear change. We saw them go with apparent ease from partner-gear to life-partner-gear.
I trust that they did this with the knowledge that they gained through much hardship in going from the serious-girlfriend-gear to the partner-gear.
Such knowledge will allow them to account for all sorts of life's speed bumps in their relationship and I trust that their lives will be full of joy for it.
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* My father said that is was very inventive that I thought of using the forces exerted by magnets as they fight each others polarity as a frictionless alternative to clutch plates. He said that unfortunately the idea had been invented already.
He encouraged me to keep thinking of new ideas, and that I shouldn't feel bad about. True to his advice I never do.
